“And a leper came to him, imploring him, and kneeling said to him, ‘If you will, you can make me clean.’ Moved with pity, he stretched out his hand and touched him and said to him, ‘I will; be clean.’ And immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean” (Mark 1:40-42, ESV).

Tonight at Kairos, the guest speaker was the pastor from The Porch ministry out of Dallas, Texas, He spoke from Mark 1 about Jesus coming down the mountain and healing the leper. He noted that while religion is man’s attempt to climb the mountain to get to God, Christianity is God coming down the mountain to get to man.

It’s interesting that in this account, Jesus touches the leper. He didn’t have to. He could just as easily have spoken the word to heal him or even done the healing from a great distance, as He did with the centurion’s servant. But He didn’t. He touched the leper.

I heard once of something called the great reversal. Basically, in normal circumstances, if you or I touched a leper back then, we would have been unclean. We would have had to do the ceremonial procedures prescribed in the law of Moses.

But when Jesus touched that leper, Jesus wasn’t the one who became unclean. It was the leper who was made clean. It was a signal of Jesus reversing the curse of sin.

Because of the curse, the natural progression is from life to death, but with Jesus, we see Him raising Lazarus from death to life.

The curse means that we are divided from each other and separated from God, but Jesus brings us from division to unity, and from being separated from God to belonging to the family of God.

The great reversal means that every evil, every injustice, every wrong brought about by the fall is coming untrue and coming undone. Jesus is working to restore creation to its original splendor and us to the peace and joy that originated in the garden of Eden.

It shows that Jesus is stronger than leprosy. He’s stronger than any cancer or COVID or dementia. He’s stronger than pain, suffering or death. He’s even stronger than the grave and hell. He has conquered them all, and while they will all pass away, He will not. One day, they will be no more, but He will always remain and He will always reign.